General Manager - People Operations

About the job

The GM People Operations owns the machinery that determines how Disrupt actually runs for its people, day to day: how talent gets discovered and hired, how employees experience policy and process from their first day to their last, and the physical workplace, including its safety, that they operate in.

The mandate operates at two altitudes at once. At the operating altitude, this is a hands-on role: stepping into a stalled hiring pipeline personally, walking the floor to see where facilities are actually failing, fixing the HR ops process generating complaints instead of commissioning a study on it. At the strategic altitude, this role is accountable for how the people operating model is designed to scale, what standardises across BUs and what flexes locally, what gets systematised through tooling versus held by people, what the four-pillar structure needs to look like at meaningfully higher headcount.

Neither altitude excuses the other. A GM who only operates strategically becomes a slide-deck function disconnected from what employees actually experience. A GM who only operates on the ground never fixes the structural reasons the same fires keep recurring. This role is judged on doing both, often in the same week.

WHAT THIS ROLE IS REALLY ABOUT

1 · Talent Acquisition as an Engine TA is not "filling requisitions on request." It is sourcing discipline, funnel conversion, time-to-fill, hiring manager experience, and cost-per-hire economics, run as a system. The GM holds the TA lead accountable for the engine, and personally steps into critical or stuck searches, senior hires, hard-to-fill roles, unhappy hiring managers, rather than waiting for an escalation to land on the desk.

2 · People Experience: HR Operations and Soft FM This covers the full employee lifecycle: onboarding, documentation, contracts, exits, and policy administration, alongside the soft facilities that shape daily experience, cafeteria, transport, workplace amenities. The standard is precision and the absence of friction. Employees shouldn't be able to tell where HR Operations ends and Soft FM begins, because nothing they touch feels broken. The GM audits this personally and periodically sits inside the work itself, an onboarding session, a ticket queue, rather than only reviewing reports about it. GM people ops will also be responsible to lead the design and implementation of 360 and PMF, resulting in development of workforce based on AI first agenda.

3 · Workplace Support and the Physical Operating Environment Office facilities, vendor relationships, space planning, and day-to-day workplace standards across Karachi and Dubai. The GM determines whether the physical environment actually supports how teams work, holds vendors to account directly, and is the first call when something breaks, not the last to find out.

4 · Security and Safety as a Proactive Discipline Physical security, access control, incident response readiness, and safety protocols. This is the domain most likely to be invisible until it fails. The job is to keep it invisible by being proactive: real drills, real audits, and a personal habit of checking that protocols are followed in practice, not just documented on paper.

5 · Service Delivery Discipline Across All Pillars Internal employees are customers. The GM sets service levels, ticket resolution time, hiring funnel SLAs, facilities turnaround, security responsiveness, across all four pillars, and treats a missed SLA as a personal accountability item rather than a pillar lead's problem to be managed from a distance.

6 · Budget Ownership and Cost Discipline The GM owns the full People Operations budget end to end, across talent acquisition, people experience, workplace support, and security, and allocates it across the pillars rather than letting each lead negotiate its own. Vendor and facilities spend sit inside this budget; the GM renegotiates terms directly when the economics don't work, and resists the default instinct to answer a service gap with more headcount or more vendor spend rather than a better process.

7 · Designing the Operating Model as the Company Scales As Disrupt scales, the GM makes the structural calls: what centralises (core HR policy) versus what flexes (workplace amenities, local hiring approach), and what the four-pillar structure needs to become at meaningfully higher headcount.

8 · The Escalation of Last Resort When something breaks during a high-stakes moment, a payroll-adjacent HR ops failure, a facilities failure during an important event, a critical hire falling through, the GM is the person who steps in directly and closes it out personally, not the person informed after the fact.

9 · Partnership with HR Business Partnering HRBPs own the strategic, business-facing relationship with each BU, performance counsel, org design input, workforce risk.The GM is accountable for making sure the Ops treat HRBP input as a priority partner request, not a queue to be fought through, and for keeping the line between "business partnering" and "operational delivery" clean enough that neither side quietly absorbs the other's scope.

10 · HRIS and Systems of Record Everything runs on systems, not goodwill, and the GM owns that backbone: the HRIS, the applicant tracking system, the ticketing tool for HR Operations, and the access and reporting systems sitting under Security. Accountability here is for whether the data is accurate, current, and usable for decisions, not scattered across spreadsheets and inboxes. As headcount grows, this layer is what lets the four pillars scale without scaling their own headcount in proportion, or quietly becomes the reason they can't.

11 · Multi-Entity Compliance Disrupt operates through Disrupt Services Pakistan and Disrupt Services UAE, two entities with different labour law, visa, gratuity, and statutory obligations. The GM is accountable for ensuring HR Operations executes correctly against both, not as an afterthought inside policy administration but as a standing discipline with its own audit cadence. Getting this wrong is not a service complaint, it's a legal exposure, and the GM is the person who catches it before it becomes one.

WHAT THIS ROLE WILL BE JUDGED ON

• How employees describe HR Operations and Soft FM, measured by complaint volume and resolution speed, not satisfaction-survey averages
• Whether the workplace across Karachi and Dubai functions without employees noticing the effort behind it
• Security and safety readiness, and whether protocols hold up when actually tested
• Service-level adherence, reported pillar by pillar, not blended into a single average
• Budget discipline against plan, and quality of the trade-off decisions made across the four pillars
• Whether all operate as one connected system or four separate departments
• Personal visibility, whether the organisation experiences this role as present in the details that matter, not only at the leadership table
• The quality of the working relationship with HRBPs, whether they experience Ops as a responsive partner or as a queue
• Data integrity and usability across the HRIS and surrounding systems, whether decisions can be made directly from it or require manual reconciliation first
• Compliance outcomes across both entities, and whether issues are caught before they become exposures, not after

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Track Record The candidate will have run people operations, HR shared services, or a comparable multi-pillar operating function inside a company that scaled meaningfully, ideally spanning talent acquisition, HR operations, facilities, and a security or safety function under one accountable leader. They will have owned a real budget across multiple functions, personally fixed broken operational processes rather than only commissioning others to fix them, and made structural calls about how an operating function needs to change as headcount and complexity grow. They will also have direct experience owning an HRIS or equivalent system of record, and navigating compliance across more than one jurisdiction or legal entity as a real part of the job, not a footnote to it.

Operating Disposition

• Comfortable being the person who personally steps into the detail when something is broken, not just the one reviewing the dashboard about it
• Equally comfortable stepping back to redesign how the function is structured as the company scales, without using strategy as a place to hide from the floor
• Decisive under operational pressure: facilities failures and hiring crunches don't wait for a committee
• Master AI in people operations
• Builds and trusts capable pillar leads, while staying willing to work alongside them, not just above them, when stakes are high
• Respects HR Business Partnering as a function and resists absorbing or duplicating its scope
• Treats internal employees as customers and service levels as commitments, not aspirations
• Not a role for a candidate who manages the function through reports and reviews rather than direct presence
• Not a role for a candidate who treats strategy and execution as two separate jobs

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

The successful candidate will have run people operations, HR shared services, or a comparable multi-pillar operating function inside a company that scaled meaningfully, spanning talent acquisition, HR operations, facilities, and a security or safety function under one accountable leader. They will have owned a real budget across multiple functions, managed an HRIS or equivalent system of record directly, and navigated compliance across more than one jurisdiction as a genuine part of the job. They will have personally fixed broken operational processes rather than only commissioning others to fix them, and made real structural calls about how the function evolves as headcount and complexity grow.